In his article, Stephen Swoyer opens a new perspective on Cloud Computing to me. Quoting Stephen Elliot, vice-president of strategy with CA Inc.’s infrastructure management and automation practice, he figures out the importance of the cloud concept for enterprises.

For Elliot, Cloud Computing is basically a conceptual refinement of pervasive virtualization. He argues that the Enterprise Cloud model is an inevitable consequence of pervasive virtualization, a virtualization with a business-centric mindset.

Cloud Computing is is about making the IT accountable for the CIO and CEO, not about virtualizing the IT. Customers will not pay the IT to only host their applications or services. Customers purchase a clearly defined service. Therefore, the Enterprise Cloud should be seen as business-process-as-a-service, not so much as software-as-a-service.

In the business-process-as-a-service model, the value of the Enterprise Cloud can be measured with business metrics. If vendors spotlight the accountability as advantage of this model, the customers would be able to provide a proper calculation of the ROI of adapting Cloud Computing. On that condition Enterprise Clouds would become reality in organizations. As computational costs continue to move downward, the financial ROI of adapting Cloud Computing will become even better in future. It’s just a matter of time before it becomes a norm for organizations to take advantage of the Enterprise Cloud.